Tag Archives: Edward Weston

Now that she’s arrived, was there anything else to it? A life summoned itself and paused for a while. Yes, there was always a pause, Larisa noticed; a breather in between the chapters.

She never imagined her death, never was the type to bear the hubris of planning her own funeral. Like weddings, death demanded metaphors. To capture oneself, to be summarized, direly: But how can one not be so many things at once? Besides, the way she felt, ceremonies strived for a shared experience; not a centralized meditation that treated the self as the object of all other events; that separated and sought how different one was from the rest, taking for granted the universality of it all. She didn’t have the ego for it.

Larisa had been living for others, certainly: a symptom assigned mostly to her gender. In her family, she had witnessed the earlier generations of women lose themselves in sacrificial love. For the sake of their children, their husbands, their aging parents, they carried on serving; until they found themselves having a hard time remembering what they themselves had wanted, originally, all along. Remember those days? How many times she’d heard the mournful reminiscence in a woman’s voice: Those days! What happened since then, Larisa wondered, herself still a young girl; what force of obscurity slithered itself in between and demanded for a retraction, or a delay at least.

Definitely, she wouldn’t lose the sight of her own purpose, she thought! Yet, the loneliness came scratching at the backdoor, becoming louder as she compared the things other women claimed as accomplishments: dramatic courtships, the victory in which meant expensive weddings and doting husbands, as one could only hope; then, the automatic events of pregnancy and nest acquiring (building, building, gaining weightiness); the demands of a chosen lifestyle, or in the cases of the less fortunate — merely survivals. Every woman she knew had leapt into all of it without ever questioning the reality of her expectations. How could their husbands — the equally unknowing human beings with a whole other set of expectations imposed onto them — keep up? They too, when young, once dreamt of following the call of the world’s magnificence. But lives demanded to be defined by success; and what others made of success — was not at all what she’d imagined.

There was love, of course. There would always be love. Beyond her own anxiety and self-judgement, she could see that a life was only as successful as the love one projected. Still, in the beginning, it was loneliness that determined the pursuit of it; and loneliness made things more urgent, non-negotiable and somehow crucial. It conformed the shape of love, so it could fit into the missing parts; make-up for the previous mistakes of others; fix, mold, make it better. Because in a person, there were always parts missing: from too much love, or not enough of it, from the prototypes of our lovers (god bless our parents!), who couldn’t possibly step up to what love was meant to be, as she thought of it: all forgiving, non-discriminating, fluid.

And what about the needs? One had to have needs. It was a path of nature. Larisa found the balance between the self-fulfillment of those needs and the ones she could hand over to another — unpoetic and stressful. So, she chose to handle all of them on her own; not with any sense of confrontation or showmanship, but with the esteem of self-reliance. And surely, Larisa thought, it would only elevate the love. Surely, if one handled the demands of one’s survival with this much grace, there would be more room for the beauty and the compassion; the reflection of the self in the suffering of others and the almost rapturous feeling of knowing exactly how it felt to be another; for such a love lacked fear, and it could take up spaces with its tide-like tongues, and whenever it retracted, one only had to wait for its return. In light, in easiness: What surrender!

Larisa wasn’t really sure how or where, in the self, the unease began. On that day — a day unmarked by any significance — she’d gone into a church. With her head bowed and eyes half-closed, she didn’t seek answers or help, only a space from which to observe the ways her thoughts moved, sometimes birthing moods, sometimes — nothingness; and she watched herself alter, even while in stillness, mind creating matter; thoughts becoming intentions; and she cast the net into the endless vagueness and brought them back into the very is-ness of her: Into what she believed the most.

This church appeared make-shift, marking a spot where, under an influence of a former fanatical thought, an ancient Russian cathedral had been burnt down over half a century ago. A modest wooden building, unheated, undecorated, in a shape of a polygon, sat in the shadowy corner of a square. The country was living through an era of resurrected gods and revalidated heros, often dead by now, having been taken for granted for the sake of simplifying a former common ambition. Things crumbled. Alliances turned chaotic. And when everyone woke up to amended history — figures worthy of worship long gone and nearly forgotten — a common panic ensued. For even if it weren’t the ego that made a people matter, it had to be their spirit; a common memory of a civilization.

The roads had frozen overnight; and at first, she had snuck-in to thaw out her stiff toes. She purchased a candle at the door, mostly out of habit. She didn’t even know how that particular ceremony worked. Two side altars, with figures of crucified saints, sat against the walls of the church, opposite of each other. Standing there for a while, still and unnoticed, she studied the other women who moved like ghosts across the dirt floor. Everyone was fully clothed. She looked down at her feet and shifted: There was little hope of her finding much warmth there. Still, she stayed. She paused, and in the growing shadows of her memories, she waited.

Older women in head scarves, with histories written across their tired faces, were crossing themselves at their chosen mantels. Some moved their lips in prayer, repeatedly lowering their heads in a manner that came after so much practice, one was no longer moved by it. What misfortunes had brought them here? Loss required humility, otherwise one was consumed with fury. Her country had lived through tragedies with a numbness of habit. Resignation was often advised by the elderlies, yet she found herself incompetent at it.

She took another look at the suspended saints and walked over to the side alter with a Christ whose eyes were semi-open. A little girl in a rabbit fur hat clung to the leg of her grandmother. Larisa looked down at the child and without raising her hand, moved her fingers inside the mitten. The child, sensing an interaction, got shy and clutched the old woman’s leg with more zealousness, for children often appeared overwhelmed with the energy of living. Their egos struggled with the life force they had been granted (what were they supposed to do, to be? how did they matter); and juxtaposed against the even flow of hours — one’s magnificence was only seen in silence, she believed — the egos expanded; for surely, they had to become something better.

The one that had preceded Nina suffered from a permanent tension of his vocal cords. He had picked me up at the Santa Monica Library — a house of glass and metal, and the place of rest for many a homeless in the City where no one could ever find a home. Not really. Sure, one had a house, or a place. A joint. A roommate situation. But to be at home — one had to be willing to belong.

“Hmm. That’s an interesting pullover you’re wearing,” said the young creature, at the Library, smug with studied confidence. Not natural at all.

I granted him a single glance-over: An overachiever, to a tee. Something about him lacked the swagger of those whose choices and whims were endorsed by family’s name or a bank account (which ever one had more clout). Yes, still: He tried. Immediately, I knew: He, who poured this much attention into his subject — who reached too far and tried too hard, straining beyond the plasticity of his compassion (which would already be magnificently excessive), he who choked with forced praise — would rarely be comfortable in silence. Not in the mood for busy talk, I changed the subject whilst looking for an exit:

“What are you reading, mate?” I threw over my shoulder. The echo played a round of ping-pong with my sounds between the glass walls of the reading room. Ate, ate, ate. To which, a studying nerd deflated his lungs, somewhere in the corner:

“SHHHHHH!”

Neither looking back at the distressed prisoner of knowledge nor wanting to look ahead at this new lingering aggressor against silence, I focused on the hardbound books with which he had been shielding himself, with brown, hairless arms. The fading edges of their cloth binding would smell of mold at the spine, and then of dehydration from the air and sun; overexposure to the oil of human fingers and the salt of readers’ tears, surprised to have their empathy awoken by someone’s words: Still alive, that thing? Because the heart was usually the last one to give up. And then, the lungs: SHHHHHH.

The aged tomes in the man-child’s arms promised to titillate my ear more than his words. Words, words.

“What am I reading?! Oh. Um. Nothing…” (Oh, c’mon! The nerd in the corner was turning red, by now, from the justified resentment at being invisible to us, as he had been his whole life.) “Well. Oscar Wilde and Evelyn Waugh, actually.” The man-child finally spat out, then hesitated, gave this cords another straining pull: “I know! Not butch enough — for a straight male!” He nearly choked there! Words, words, word.

Oh. One of those: Simultaneously eager and tormented! The one to flaunt his politics out loud, just so that the others didn’t get the wrong idea. Because whatever happened in beds he visited (even if out of the other lover’s loneliness or boredom) would be the reason for his later torment. The guilt, the loathing. The other obstacles to self-esteem. And he would wear them like a frilly scarf from Urban Outfitters, meant to accent things — to draw attention, and perhaps make him more “interesting” — but not to serve the very original function. The it-ness of the thing was lost.

With me, the man-child, worked his words (words, words) to become liked enough. And after one eve of heavy breathing and pulsating blood flow, perhaps, he would be asked to stay. I questioned, though, if he knew exactly what he wanted: sex — or its statistic? The mere happening of it? Sex was a fact of his hormonal balance; and if he could help ignore it, he would move out of his body entirely and occupy his head. But for right now, the boy still had to get some, however accidentally.

The love you take — is equal…

He took, he claimed. And if he didn’t, he would storm out of sentences with scorn of having to sublimate his desires, yet again. Alas, the world was so unfair.

“But you!” Against the walls, he kept thumping the words like racket balls. The poor boy was trying! “You! — must be so erudite!”

“SHHHHHH!”

“Or really?” I hissed, considering the possibility of the nerd’s heart attack for which I was not willing to bear the responsibility. At least, not on a Monday night. “Is it the pullover?” I asked and pushed him out of the way. Over, over, over.

The man-child lingered, then began to laugh with that obnoxious howl meant to draw attention. Again, too much. Too hard. So insincere! Petrified! SHHH! SHHHHHH…

“He sounds messy!” diagnosed Taisha, while she herself was negotiating the rush hour traffic. It was always rush hour, somewhere, in this City. Her windows rolled down — I could hear the screech of others’ breaks in the lazy heat of another smoggy afternoon. If one survived the mind-numbing dissatisfaction at having to just sit there — while getting nowhere and watching life slip out thorough the vents of fans — half of LA would give up on the idea of stepping out again, that night.

“I think I’m coming down with something.”

“…It’s food poisoning, I think.”

Like nowhere else, here, people were prone to canceling plans. To giving-up.

“I’m waiting for the cable guy. It sucks!”

“My cat is sick.”

Each night, the people landed in their private spaces, shared with other people or their own delusions. They heated up some frozen options from Trader Joe’s and locked their doors agains the City.

I listened to the life force of LA: Still plentiful, it breezed through all four open windows of Taisha’s Prius. This place — a forty four mile long conveyer belt that moved things along, living or inanimate (it moved lives along); and if one could not keep up, the weight of failure would remain under one’s breath. The City of Lost Angels. The City of Lost Hearts.

“Now listen! Don’t do ANYTHING! until I see you!” Taisha ordered me; and although my heart maintained its pace, it winced at little, subjected to her care. “Don’t sleep with him! You’re dangerously close to some stupid choices, right about now!” (She was referring to the draught of my sexuality. When I blew out the thirty candles of my birthday cake, the promiscuity that granted me some fame, was also put out, surprisingly and seemingly for good. Into that space, I started cramming wisdom.)

“I am one lucky bastard — to have you love me like you do,” I responded, singing my words halfway through the sentence.

Oh, how she fought it! My dear Tai! All business and busyness, the girl refused to slow down for sentimentality’s sake: “Oh, you, white people! Ya’ll get so mushy ‘round love. My people, back in Kenya…”

“Ah, jeez! Alright!” I interrupted, misty-eyed. “I’ll talk to you.”

Taisha would be talking, still, like “peas and carrots” in the mouths of actors. But I could hear her smile break through. Humanity still happened here, amidst perpetual exhaust and one’s exhausted dreams. Somewhere along the stretched-out, mellow land attacked by bottom-feeders and the self-diluted who knew not why exactly they made a run for here, but mostly headed West in a trajectory that had been paved by others — it happened. Some stayed, too tired or too broken of hearts. And they comprised my City.

“Everyone seems so shallow here!” the man-child (he would be from Connecticut, but of course!) was overlooking the crawling traffic, like a Hamlet in his soliloquy. And from the upstairs patio table we’d taken while splitting a bottle of ginger ale (for which I’d paid), he seemed to be in perfect lighting. The row of yellow street lights had suddenly come on above his head. The dispersed taillight red reflected on his face from the West-bound traffic. The boy was slowly sipping — on my drink.

“Big spender!” I could already hear the voice of my Kenyan Confucius. “RUN! Run while you can!”

“But YOU! You seem like you’re here by accident!” His terrorism by kindness did have one thing going for it, called lucky timing.

“I am so lonely,” I wanted to let out, right underneath the yellow light now holding conferences of moths and fruit flies. At a table nearby, a girl blogger clacked away on her snow-white Mac, while glancing at us from underneath her Bettie Page bangs. What does it feel like — to be written?

“What if I slept with him?” I thought. It’s better to have loved…

Except that: I had turned thirty. And I could no longer take for granted the ghosts of previous lovers that crowded a bedroom during a seemingly inconsequential act. A Greek Chorus of the Previously Departed. And then, the heart of one participant, at least, would wake up — with yearning or having to remember its wrong-doings or when the wrong was done to it — and things turned messy. So, sex was never simple; especially for this one, who now tipped the last drops of my ginger ale into his glass.

“You wanna drink?” Familiarity had started working on my sentences already, like cancer in my marrow. Still, IT — could have happened, still. IT would have started with a shared drink. “A beer, or something?” I tensed my body to get up.

“Nah, thanks. I’m in AA.”

I looked at him: His eyes began to droop like a basset hound’s: Just ask me — of my suffering. The frilly Urban Outfitters scarf picked up against the gust of wind. My chair scraped away from him — and from the table now mounted by issues of his angst. My entertained desire shriveled.

Yet still — I stayed!

When he and I made loops around the neighborhood, dumbfounding the drivers at each intersection with our pedestrian presence. Through windshields, I would find their eyes — like fish in an aquarium, unable to blink — and they calculated the time they had to make the light without plastering our bodies with their wheels. Preferably. The man-child let me lead the way. A winner!

And still — I stayed.

I stayed when I had climbed onto a stone fence, and now even to his height I waited for the lean-in. The boy hung back, decapitating his hands at his wrists by sticking them into his pant pockets. His words continued to pour out: His praise came up along my trachea, with bubbles of that shared ginger ale, which now tasted of rejected stomach acid.

But still. I stayed. I waited. Because sometimes, to those who wait — life grants, well, nothing. And nothing, sometimes, seemed to be the choice of greater courage.

“She never rains. The poor girl, She’s all cried out.”

Nina’s hair, unless right after the shower, shot out of her head in spirals of prayer. Of course, she hated it. A black woman’s hair: Don’t touch it, unless you’re done living altogether. The glory of it was slightly confused by auburn shades inherited from Nina’s Irish mother. And underneath that mane — sometimes set afire by the sun’s high zenith — and right below her smooth forehead, two eye, of furious green, devoured the words that she had been reading to me from headstones.

“Which one is that?” I asked and walked to her side of a burgundy granite, with jagged edges, still shiny like a mirror. It had to have been a pretty recent death.

She wrapped herself further into her own arms and chuckled, “No one, silly. I just said that. About this City.” Like an enamored shadow, I hung behind her. “This would be the perfect time for rain. Except that She — is all dried out, you see?” The furious green slid up my face. “But She — is really something, isn’t She?”

It was indeed refreshing, for a change, to be with a woman so free from posing. Of course, I’d witnessed moments of vanity on her before: When her pear-shaped backside lingered at the boudoir before she’d finally slip in between the covers and curve around me. And all the open spaces — she occupied by flooding.

I wondered if she knew the better angles of herself. Because I saw them all. When in an unlikely moment of worrying about my long-term memory’s lapse, I whipped out my phone and aimed its camera at Nina’s regal profile, she must’ve been aware that her beauty was beyond anything mundane. For I had studied many a pretty girls before, the ones with the self-esteem of those who have never been denied much. But Nina’s beauty wrote new rules, of something warm and living. It came from occupying her skin with no objections to its shape of color; from delicate sensibility and softness, like the wisp of a hair across a lover’s face. But there was also: strength. And heritage. And underneath my touch, she moved.

But maybe, after all, justice was meant to sound like silence: Not a marathon of mauled over words she had previously thought were required for forgiveness, which, in the end, left her exhausted; her throat — dehydrated. Sarah despised feeling like that. Shouldn’t forgiveness be a higher ground, an emotion that belonged to the Magnanimous and the Wise? the, god bless them, Non-Mundane? Instead, she watched herself become a woman with a sloppy face, like a washed-up actress on the screen of a decade-long soap opera; and she paced her apartment, with the cell phone sweating against her ear (surely causing her cancer later in life!); and she worked laboriously — on forgiveness: Holding up each word in front of her torso, measuring it at the shoulder seams. Are the sleeves too long? Does it make her look fat? Is there anything — left to be done?

And neither did this newly discovered sound of justice resemble the forced catharsis she chased in sessions with her shrink. Where had she learned to expect these miraculous results? Must’ve been on another TV show, somewhat better written for a channel on which the actors were allowed to swear; and they could cry unattractively, while spraying spit and snot. (Later on, in interviews, these same actors would call the scenes “career defining”, while Sarah found them merely mocking humanity. Maybe, the problem was she was easily bored. Or, maybe, she understood too much.)

Sarah’s shrink was a poised woman who wore clothes from the manikins of Gap and Banana Republic — clothes that on Sarah always sat awkwardly and sadly, and made her apologize, for something, as she returned the silly plastic hangers to the changing-room girls: “Sorry…”; the poised woman who appeared immune from being shocked by the atrocities Sarah’s mother had interfiled into her life, like thin jackets of DVD’s with splatter horrors, hidden in a heart surgeon’s movie collection.

Nifty!

The word one would never use in Sarah’s own obituary was made for the lives of women like her PsyD. (Was the “p” silent, in that? She’d assumed that, but was embarrassed to ask. So, she began writing “Date with Sid” in her calendar, every Tuesday, even though the shrink’s name was Miranda. Miranda Bloom comma Sid.) Her Sid’s world — was nifty. Nifty piles of magazines in a fan formation of a peacock’s tail. Nifty little plastic plants, never wilting, lining the dust-less bookshelves with thick or thin books, always dense, whose reading made Sarah feel sleepy. Or apologetic. Even the clean-lined IKEA furniture — with unforgiving, hard surfaces and un-homey fabric patterns never to be found in her mother’s hysterical universe of tchotchkes — was nifty.

Sarah, unlike her Sid, could never be nifty. She tried, coming back for another round of awkward mirror reflections in dressing rooms of Banana Republic. But somehow, it just wouldn’t fit. Any of it. The store’s white lighting buzzed above and revealed Sarah’s old pockmarks from her 5th grade measles that her mother had decided to treat with holy water and sage. Embarrassed, Sarah would place the nifty cloths over a pile of colorful and bejeweled women’s underwear while avoiding the bored and slightly inquisitive stares of the salesgirls (“Sorry…”); and she’d swear to never come back.

But she would. After seeing another nifty woman laughing into the pinstriped bicep of a handsome man, on West End Avenue, she would attempt to shop for that life again, as if she hadn’t learned the lesson. The same way she hadn’t learned the lesson with Doug — a tenured professor of poetry on an epic journey of trying to leave his wife. She continued to come back to him. Maybe this time. They would carry on, until neither could recall whose turn it was to leave; who was doing the staying, the grasping, the scorning; and who would be in charge of forgiving.

“What do you want, ideally, from your life with Doug?” the shrink, looking particularly nifty, paced her words as Sarah thumbed the thinning threads of her sweater sleeves. She often wore her clothes to tatters, until the freckles of rolled lint began crowding her armpits and crotch; and she would be, again, embarrassed.

“Sorry?”

She didn’t expect the question. Between the two of them, Doug was the one with the plan. She — was the woman with none. She had met him at the library where she’d interned one summer, having purchased herself a Liberal Arts education that should’ve guaranteed her a teaching career, had Sarah really wanted one. Except that she didn’t. Hadn’t. She hadn’t thought it through, while in college; and she landed in the library; landed with an intention to leave, eventually — like those grayish-white swans that landed in her Ukrainian birth village one autumn; but miscalculated, stayed too long and froze during the first drop of the temperatures.

She had been following her fragmented thoughts about her Sid’s sexuality, when the question got hung in the air, each word — an ornament of paper-thin glass:

“What do you__want?__Ideally.__From your life__with Doug?”

“I wonder if she dates women?” Sarah had been thinking, while thumbing her sweater, about the Sid, based on the mere fact that the woman wore primarily flat shoes. Sarah stopped, having been caught red-handed. Red-thumbed.

She, of course, would never say this out loud. She — “of course!” — was much worldlier than that! But Sarah was also an immigrant’s daughter, not born in this country. (Which, to most, had made her worldly enough, but never exotic. “Exotic” belonged to girls from the countries that Americans favored for tourism: the tan and taut creatures from escapist lifestyles, and from the irresponsible summer flings of middle-aged men, bored in their marriages.) The dull shards of her mother’s old-fashioned prejudice still appeared in situations of ultra-Westernized pathos. Like this one: Sarah, on a very hard couch (surely earning herself cancer, later in life!); complaining, coming down hard, then taking cover from her shame in a numb silence of a spoiled brat; then, seeking refuge in a blunt stereotype with which her mother broke down the world.

No matter how hard she tried — to wring her hands, like that actress with the sloppy face — her shrink appeared unimpressed. Some of Sarah’s college classmates had spoken of how easily they gained alliances with their Sids. She, however, seemed incompetent at manipulation. Sarah was smart but not that smart. (Pretty, but not “exotic”.) And she wondered if her shrink was now judging her for the extramarital affair with Doug. (It was “extramarital” for Doug, not for Sarah. Sarah was just an outside participant, far from being an outside force. A third wheel, along for the ride, however crippled. “The woman with none.”)

Could it be the case that her shrink was now appalled and no longer impartial? Anything you say__or do__can__and will be__held against you?

Sarah never got the warning — from Miranda, the Sid.

Most of her teenage years, she had spend sorting out the world. The one of her mother’s — which she was obliged to automatically respect — confused her with its invasive familiarity; and she found herself pretending to not understand the cashiers at the Ukrainian deli, who attempted to speak to her in Russian. Somehow, they all knew her, even though their faces appeared no more familiar than the color-enhanced photographs of the folk dancers in the Times Travel Section, on Kiev. But they knew her: her name, her marital status (or the lack of one) and occupation. Or, they knew her mother. But did that at all justify their asking for her phone number so that they could fix her up “with a nice Russian boy” (which most of the time meant some young alcoholic heir of a local mechanic, who wore rhinestoned jeans and spent his inheritance on bottle services all over town)?

The new world — again, chosen by her mother who left the old country with five-year-old Sarah, in the name of a better life — that world seemed to be fast-talking and brash, filled with people who suffered from fashionable dis-eases, like “depression” and “ADD”; inflamed “sciaticas” and bored souls. The new world seemed allergic to sentiment. Even sex wasn’t safe here; and after her first “mature” (as her mother called it) experience, Sarah began to notice that sex came with shame. The smarter girls (often “exotic”) used it to negotiate free deals. Free meals. The dependent ones confused it for love, always making, forcing something out of it. And Sarah pitied the men who had been trained to get it, but not know what to do with it, afterward. So, it would sit — a pulsating blur in one’s living-room, underneath the soft light, waiting for the lovers to go through with it.

“You, Amerikan vemen,” her mother would say, in her reckless English, whenever she lectured the American womanhood in her daughter. “You dan’t know vat you vant.”

On her ride home on the A-train, Sarah had made a hobby out of watching the two cultures collide on the faces of Russian teenagers heading to Coney Island, late in the evening. She could always pick them out of a crowd: Their Western fashion looked slightly misfitted (far from nifty, and somehow wrong: “Sorry…”). And the words — “Whack!”, “Sick!”, “Fo’ sho’!” — came out unaccented phonetically, but their cadence was off. Something was off, always, in the immigrant world; but because she couldn’t name it, perfectly, precisely, to her American contemporaries, Sarah often found herself misunderstood. And silent.

“What’s your beef with yo’ mama, anyway, man?” J.C. always called her “man”. He was an artist living in Brooklyn Heights, and yes, they had tried sleeping together once. J.C. stopped it from happening though, when Sarah’s toes got tangled up in his socks while she tried to pull them off with her feet. (There were many ways to make sex feel pathetic. But a naked lover in white tube-socks — was the surest.)

“I wanna respect you, man…” he said looking down at Sarah from a propped-up pillow while she paved a trail of dry kisses in between his breasts and wondered about a sexier way to get rid of a curly hair, stuck in the back of her tongue. There was no such a way. So, she hooked her index finger, jammed it inside her mouth and began fishing for it.

By then, J.C. was already spewing out his theories on sexual politics. Sarah nearly gagged. He was first generation American born, from South America (so, did that even count?). She had assumed, at the time, that J.C. knew something she didn’t; so, she stopped. In those moments, it would’ve been less awkward — or less sad — to be one of those outspoken, brave American girls, with wild hair, layers of hippie jewelry and bright red lipstick, who had ready ideas on sexual liberation of women and mysterious comebacks via the ironic lyrics of Dylan or Ginsberg. Sarah was smart, but not that smart. Not nifty. Not “exotic”.

That night, she took the subway home, fishing for the curly hair in the back of her throat, in an empty train car. What was the big deal, she wondered. And why was it that men could so easily justify speaking on behalf of her conscience, her desires?

Doug had done it to her, for years: choosing for her from the menus of fancy restaurants. Over the years, their eateries would change, going from the dimly lit expensive places to the crowded diners with hairy waiters who emerged from the kitchen with stained pots of coffee. Doug had been on an epic journey to leave his wife. But maybe, Sarah just wasn’t enough of a reason.

Sorry…

Sarah leaned her forehead against the cold glass of the sliding doors and cried, quietly, finger hooking at the back of her throat.